All The Ways To Make Money In Media Without Ads

Synchronous Pay-as-you-go: This is the same model as above but with the added thrill of real-time interaction between creator and fan.

Research: Leverage journalists’ research practice for organizations looking for more in-depth market insight and business intelligence.

1) Commerce: Broadly defined in this context as any model in which a content creator profits from driving transactional behavior rather than merely stoking an intent to buy.

Job Listings: Since media brands are nodes in larger information webs and those webs are merely connections between people, it’s no wonder media companies have an edge in building talent marketplaces.

Data: What may start as covering a beat — say technology investments — can become a business intelligence product that relies on a combination of human expertise and software designed to ingest massive amounts of proprietary data. Example: CB Insights

Production: Unlike subscriptions, in which the consumer pays for content, the production category refers to creators selling their content services to an enterprise customer.

Corporate/Bulk Subscriptions: Defined here as multi-user access to content based on a contract instead of a single user’s credit card

At a time when Google, Facebook and Amazon capture up to 70% of all ad dollars generated in the US and newspapers across the country have shed half their journalism jobs since 2008, you may think only a masochist would make a career in ad-supported media right now.

Paywall for bundled content: Represents various ways of rationalizing a subscription cost by offering original, licensed, and UGC content. Example: Medium

Selling to the Enterprise: Defined here as selling content products and services to large corporate (1,000+ employee) customers in which the organization is the customer, usually as part of a service-level agreement. Typical of B2B, this process involves more stakeholders and longer decision cycles offset by the promise of stable revenue and higher... See more